Rebooted Dredd leads with his jaw

Karl Urban is feeling a little under the weather, and it doesn't help that the fire alarm has been tripped in his elegant Toronto hotel. He's trapped in the lobby -- the elevators don't work when the alarm is sounding a high-pitched siren that he says is piercing his skull.

The unintended result is that the New Zealand actor, who's dressed in an elegant suit and has the square-jawed good looks that once made him one of the rumoured contenders as the new James Bond, has taken on a slightly intimidating intensity. In fact, you might say he looks a bit like Judge Dredd.

It's hard to tell, of course, because Dredd -- the comic book character making his big-screen comeback in the action film Dredd 3D -- is never totally seen onscreen. A futuristic policeman in a dystopian society of endless crime, he wears a helmet that covers most of his face, leaving only that square jaw and a mouth that is typically turned down in a frown of disapproval.

In his leather armour and constricting helmet, he looks like a kind of RoboCop in a future where the police are also judges and executioners of ultraviolent criminals. The helmet is one of the main challenges of the role, Urban says.

"The challenge was how to communicate with the audience without the use of the eyes. How do you communicate an emotion like doubt? It's really tricky."

"Obviously the voice takes on more importance because there's more resting on it, as does the physicality of the character. The way he does what he does. You can see in certain instances in this film where there's a gear shift. Dredd is like a tightly wound coil and you can see when he gets a little unhinged in this movie: when there's a loss of innocent life. Everything takes on a heightened significance."

It's a far longer speech than anything Dredd gives in the film, which is part of the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival. Urban -- best known as Eomer in the Lord of the Rings movies and Bones in the Star Trek reboot -- says one of the things he likes about Dredd is the fact that he's a man of few words.

"It has an early '90s sensibility: those classic one-liners and a male archetype that's something we haven't seen in quite some time," he says as the hotel loudspeaker finally announces that the alarm was false. "The male archetype is a character who is tough who's in control of his emotions, who has a very dry sense of humour and even in the midst of the most chaotic action, even though he doesn't externally show it, the fact that he's spouting off a one-liner here and there, you know there's a sense of humour in that man. You look back to Sean Connery's performance in James Bond. And Schwarzenegger. Clint Eastwood, obviously, the Dirty Harry films."

Dredd, though, talks a lot less than those action heroes. In fact, Urban says the screenplay by Alex Garland was redrafted to make Dredd say less and less. When Garland and Urban met, he says he opened his copy of the script to reveal that he had drawn lines through even more of his dialogue.

"He sort of looked at it and questioned what that was about. I said, 'Look, I love this dialogue mate, but Dredd says less.' So we took even more out."

The result is a character who is more of a mystery than the man Sylvester Stallone created in the 1995 version, Judge Dredd. The new Dredd lets his gun do most of his talking, and it has a lot to express: Dredd and his new assistant (Olivia Thirlby) are called to a gigantic highrise that's run by a ruthless drug gang. They have to clean it out, floor by floor, with a series of high-powered weapons.

The character is based on a British comic that has developed a cult following, and Urban, 40, says he is well aware of the devotion of fans. He researched the story by reading every Dredd comic he could find, and it seems to have worked. Early reaction has been good to both the character and the movie's dazzling use of 3D, including scenes where the gang's drug, called SloMo, sends wafts of three-dimensional smoke slowly into the air.

It's the sort of thing on which franchises are built, and Urban says he's game.

"I'd certainly love to come back and make more, but it depends whether it finds an audience. And if it does, I'd be elated and I'd come back and make more. And if it doesn't, I'm okay with that because it's a great film. It's a one-off classic cult film, and if that's what is, so be it."

Dredd 3D opens Sept. 21

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